Many manufacturing environments require strict control over the presence of contaminants, including both dust particles and bacteria. In public health related industries, for example, in pharmaceutical or medical device manufacturing environments it is required to control not only the number of particles in the air, but also number of bacteria and fungi. Microbial contamination can make batches of pharmaceutical product harmful for patients. Furthermore, it is advantageous to have real time detection of contamination events, including instantaneous information about whether a contamination event is biologic or non-biologic, in the manufacturing facility for pharmaceuticals or medical devices. In public health air quality monitoring, water and beverage industries, such real time detection of contamination is also useful.
In many of these applications, both the environmental air and the liquids (water and finished products in liquid form) need to be monitored for the amount of microbes present.
The conventional method of detecting microbes involves the use of growth media, which collects airborne bacteria and incubates for a period of time (usually days). The delay between collecting and detection causes problems in manufacturing process. Recently, new methods have been introduced into industry for real time detection of bacteria in the environment. For example, optical detectors have been designed to detect fluorescence from metabolic chemicals inside bacteria cells (for example, NADH and riboflavin). These optical detectors have the advantage of giving real time result of bacterial contamination. The real time detection of bacteria is beneficial to the healthcare related industries.
The sensitivity of fluorescence measurement is an important criterion for an effective microbial detector because the amount of fluorescence emanating from the microbial cells is typically quite small and the detection time in a real time sensor is short.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.